Hunt on for Prince William’s distant cousins in Surat

(That was the Guardian’s doing. Days into what would turn out to be a career, not many moons ago, a dashing sub-editor faced me with the ultimatum of truncating my name or run the risk of not being credited for my articles. My given name would take up an entire paragraph, and space was a valuable newspaper asset, he argued, rather convincingly. I acquiesced. It reincarnated into Kris, his option over Krissy – that one had come in the late years of primary school, so christened by a teacher from “town,” fresh out of Training College.) For years I harboured clandestine thoughts that I was a bastard. In times when I wanted to disown my family, I convinced myself I was orphaned; on better days I savoured my secret – that I was a love child. While I combed her hair, made wavy from decades of plaiting, or massaged her back, I would smilingly indulge in this little secret I shared with my ma. She groaned approvingly every time I massaged an ache out. I dread to think what her real reaction would have been had I voiced my thoughts…But it was not just my imagination running wild. My bastardisation was the doing of the State. It began when I discovered my birth certificate a few weeks before sitting the Common Entrance examination. Under the column “Father’s name” there was a dash. Nothing else. A dash, then blank. Everyone assumed I was Rampersad because my many, many brothers and sisters carried one of my father’s names, and when you’re number 10 on the list you can’t really choose your name, or so they thought. I’d disprove it trice. Though all my official records made me his, his name was not on the birth certificate. Instead, that carefully rolled, still crisp but yellowing piece of paper ma kept in her secret place stated I was a Sookraj. Even when Rampersad went to the Red House in Port-of-Spain to swear I was his, I reserved the option of being Sookraj when I wanted. Really, I should be Kris (blank) or Kris — (dash). Three years ago, I again saw Sookraj named on paper. One then long-unknown cousin, Nelson Ramdeen, was tracing his maternal ancestors and it led him to my mother. He jotted down all our names, and the names of the children of my siblings, and the names of ma’s siblings, and their children, and her mother’s name, and her father’s name: Sookraj, a grandpa I had never known. Her unregistered Hindu marriage to my father not being recognised by law, not even 10 children later, I was stuck with her father’s name, her maiden name, hence her love child, and my romanticised bastard status. So Rampersad is the name that defines my place in a place that didn’t recognise my parents’ cultural relationships – an oral culture – but placed emphasis on things written. Writing made things real. In that way too, Moneah became real. From Ramdeen’s research, she popped to life. He traced my mother’s lineage to this faceless woman, who, for whatever reason, at age 22, from Dinapore village in Patna, India, packed her husband, Ramchurn, and her Jahaji bundle; boarded the Hougoumont on October 13, 1870; braved four months of treacherous, unfamiliar kala pani, to arrive in Trinidad four months, two days later – on February 15, 1871, one day after what would come to be known as Valentine’s Day. Thus began her love affair with Trinidad, which would outlive two husbands, spawn 10 (known) children, some 50 grandchildren (and counting, some blanks still exist); each of those had on average 40 grandchildren; each of those some 30 grands. Five generations later, I need a better capacity for math than I now possess to calculate Moneah’s contribution to Trinidad and Tobago’s voting and working population and to the Trinidad diaspora in North America, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Caribbean, which a rough estimate places beyond 5,000 human souls in various professions. (All except politics, the family jokes, and on the agenda is a motion to disown from Moneah’s lineage any who enters that profession at the next clan gathering – the first was three years ago, 130 years after Moneah’s arrival, so the next might not be until another century or so.) Moneah now lives: In the faces and the mannerisms and quirks of character of the some 3,000 women who can trace a bloodline to her. From what I know of some of those women in her lineage, I could see her, on Ramchurn’s death two and a half years after their landing, pulling her widowed orhini over her head and shrugging off considerations of becoming Suti and dying with her husband, saying, “Sati who? Mere nam, Moneah” (Meh name’s Moneah). She would mourn him properly in the traditionally defined ways, and two years later consort with our grandsire, Shewpersad, who said farewell to his cows and his village Semaie in Boodha, Gorukhpur, boarded the Brechin Castle (ship) on December 26, 1874, to Trinidad and 25 years of Moneah. Those two would seed Trinidad soil with cane and cabbages, pumpkins and pawpaws, and offspring like peas. Though only one of her sons, one great grandaughter, and two great, great grandsons would demonstrably exceed her level of fertility, the average offspring of each of the descendants over five generations stands around six. Several have inherited her genes of outliving husbands. They include beef-eating Hindus, pork-eating Muslims, bhajan-singing Christians; through their veins have flowed T&T’s coconut water and Carib, French wine, Scottish whisky, Japanese sake, India’s lassi, and whatever other beverages rage in the places they have settled and spawned their own dynasties – in the USA, Canada, Europe, Australia and India. A solid bridge now stretches seven generations – each step boldly labelled – towards Moneah. Because we know her name.

Hunt on for Prince William’s distant cousins in Surat

LONDON: Scientists have launched a hunt for possible distant cousins of Britain’s Prince William after it emerged he shared Indian ancestry. A day after DNA results revealed that the young royal carried an Indian gene, scientists said they are now looking to find his distant relatives in Surat in Gujarat.“It’s a great thing to unite people across the distances … It shows commonality,” said Dr Jim Wilson, a geneticist at the University of Edinburgh and chief scientist at Britains DNA. Dr Wilson said Eliza Kewark – Prince William’s great, great, great, great, great grandmother- gave birth to two children. Katherine Scott Forbes, born in 1812, was Prince William’s great-great-great-great grand mother. The second child, Alexander, was born two years later. “Alexander went back to India and did not die early,” said Dr Wilson. “He may have descendants there today.” Katherine later married James Crombie, a member of the coat-making family.On Friday, scientists announced that the future king of England has Indian blood in him and is a direct descendent of part-Indian Eliza Kewark, who was a house keeper for his great-great-great-great-great grandfather Theodore Forbes, a Scottish merchant who worked for the East India Company in Surat.New genetic evidence has found that Prince William, Duke of Cambridge – second in line to the British throne after his father Prince Charles– is the direct descendant of an Indian woman and that he carries her mitochondrial DNA. The same DNA lineage has also been found in Prince Harry.The scientists said it’s through an unbroken maternal line to late Princess Diana from Kewark’s daughter, Katherine, that Prince William and his brother Prince Harry inherited the Indian DNA.Born in 1790, Eliza lived in India when it was governed by the East India Company, and is thought to have had Armenian blood because of her surname.Using birth, marriage and death records, the researchers traced two of Eliza’s living direct descendants, who are both third cousins of Princess Diana’s mother Frances Shand Kydd, and tested samples of their saliva.Dr Wilson said, “This was independent evidence that there was Indian ancestry. For me, it corroborated the findings from the mtDNA. We’ve got two different kinds of genetic evidence that are independent from one another and they both corroborate the story. So it really seems that our future king has a little bit of Indian blood”.Mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA is a small piece of DNA, inherited mostly unchanged from a mother to her children. Men inherit it but do not pass it on. Princes William and Harry carry Kewark’s markers but will not pass this Indian mtDNA onto their children.The scientists said, “Through genealogy, we traced two living direct descendants and by reading the sequence of their mtDNA, we showed not only that they matched, but also that it belongs to a haplogroup called R30b, thus determining Eliza Kewark’s haplogroup. Comparison to database from over 65,000 individuals from around the world showed that only 14 examples have been reported, 13 of whom were Indian and one Nepalese”.R30b is rare even in India, where roughly 0.3% of people carry this lineage. And Eliza’s lineage is rarer still. Within haplogroup R30b, an exact match to her sequence is yet to be found. Eliza Kewark’s two descendants are estimated to be about 0.3% and 0.8% South Asian, with three blocks of South Asian DNA in each of their genomes. All the rest is of European origin.

The East india Company: http://www.britainsdna.com/royal-revelationThe East India Company was a phenomenon, a huge business enterprise that in effect ruled a subcontinent from the 17th to the 19th centuries. It raised private armies, employed generals, fought pitched battles against other European colonists, founded towns and made vast fortunes for those involved. For young men hoping to make their way in the world of the burgeoning British Empire, it was one of the most exciting, dynamic and promising avenues to success. The Company traded in silk, cotton, opium, indigo dye, saltpetre and tea, and after its famous general, Robert Clive, defeated the French at Plassey in 1757, it ran India as a virtual monopoly. When Henry Dundas became President of the Board of Control in 1784, he began to appoint Scotsmen to key positions, so much so that by the end of the 18th century, they dominated the activities of the East India Company, their connections reaching back to Scotland.The estate of Boyndlie lies about five miles south-west of Fraserburgh in the north-east corner of Aberdeenshire. As the third son of John Forbes, Theodore will have known from boyhood that his future probably did not lie in farming. Some time in the early 19th century, he found himself in the Port of Leith working in a merchant company. Trade with India was brisk and Scottish entrepreneurs had invested so heavily in the tea industry that production outstripped that of China. No doubt through contacts made in Leith, Theodore was promised a position with the East India Company and he boarded a ship bound for the Bombay Presidency. India had been divided into three presidencies or provinces and the others were centred on Calcutta and Madras.In his early twenties, Theodore set up house, probably in Surat, a major port north of Bombay itself, and he employed a housekeeper. She was Eliza Kewark, an Indian woman probably only two years younger. Her Christian name was almost certainly an anglicised version of Aleeza or Aliza. Not uncommon in the north-west of the subcontinent, it can mean ‘Precious’, or more prosaically, ‘the daughter of Ali’. In 1812 Eliza and the 24 year-old Scotsman had a child, a girl named Katharine Scott Forbes after Theodore’s mother. The baby’s birth was registered at Surat. It seems that the couple’s relationship was stable and settled, a genuine marriage, for they went on to have more children and make a family. Two years after Katharine’s birth, Alexander Scott Forbes was born and given another family Christian name. And there appears to have been a third child although no details have been thus far unearthed. But it is believed that Eliza gave birth to another daughter.Through their early childhood, Katharine, Alexander and their sibling were raised in the bustling port of Surat and almost certainly their mother taught them to speak and read Gujerati or another native language. There exists no record that Theodore and Eliza ever married. However, such liaisons were not unusual; one in three British men working in India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries married Indian women.

Boyndlie House, c1910

When Katharine was eight years old and Alexander six, their father boarded the SS Blenden Hall, a merchant ship bound for Britain. The reason for his voyage remains unknown but perhaps he planned to bring his family back to Scotland. But on 24th September 1820, Theodore Forbes died on board and was buried at sea. He was only 32 years old. Some time after news of this calamity reached both Scotland and Surat, a decision was made to bring Katharine and Alexander back to Aberdeenshire and the estate at Boyndlie. There must have been communication between the Forbes family and Eliza Kewark, for there exists no record of her third child going to Scotland. Only Katharine and Alexander made the long journey to Boyndlie, the home of grandparents and uncles and aunts they had never met. Their mother must have stayed behind in India and nothing more is known of Eliza Kewark – except for two details that brings alive the agonies of a mother being parted from her children, of seeing them board a ship to travel half a world away, probably never to be seen again.

Alexander became so homesick for Surat, his mother and his little sister that the Forbes family allowed and no doubt paid for him to return to India. Apparently this happened only a short time after the six year-old’s arrival in Aberdeenshire. The contrast between Surat and Boyndlie can only be imagined. Many years later a bundle of letters was found. Written not in English but probably in Gujerati, they had been sent by Eliza to the daughter she was destined never to see again. Perhaps they carried news to Scotland of Katharine’s brother and little sister. They also inherited the DNA of their mother, and if the third child was indeed a daughter, then it may have been passed down the generations in India. And in Britain, there is no doubt that shared mtDNA lived on in Katharine Forbes and her descendants.

In the early 19th century and on into the Victorian age, illegitimacy was perhaps less of a stigma in the fermtouns of Scotland than it might have been in the genteel drawing rooms of the cities. Much more of a problem would have been the taint of ‘coloured blood’. But since Katharine’s father had died and her mother remained thousands of miles away in India, it may be that Eliza Kewark’s ethnicity was not an immediate difficulty. Later, she was said to have been an Armenian, perhaps because Kewark could be parlayed into Kevork, an Armenian surname. Nevertheless, Eliza’s existence was not forgotten or expunged from the family tree. Perhaps that was Katharine’s doing, a stubborn unwillingness to deny her mother, the woman who had born and raised her for eight years in Surat. It is impossible to do more than guess at what was said and what was not.

In any event, Theodore and Eliza’s daughter, by this time known as Kitty, married James Crombie in Aberdeen. She was 25 years old. Her family may have remained pillars of the Scottish middle classes had Katharine’s great-granddaughter, Ruth, not married into the aristocracy. Her husband was Maurice Burke Roche, 4th Baron Fermoy, an Irish peer. Ruth became a longstanding member of the household of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. In 1954 her daughter, Frances, married Edward, Viscount Althorp (later Earl Spencer) and in 1961 gave birth to a daughter, Diana Spencer. A year after her marriage to Prince Charles in 1981, she in turn gave birth to a son, Prince William. In the direct female line, Eliza Kewark’s mitochondrial DNA had been passed down to the heir second in line to the throne of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

How is it possible to be certain of this? Mitochondrial DNA is passed down the motherline to all children. Two living direct descendants of Eliza Kewark have been found and by reading the sequence of their mtDNA, our geneticists discovered not only that it matched but that it also belonged to a haplogroup called R30b. Further research confirmed unequivocally that this is Eliza Kewark’s haplogroup. A comparison run through databases of the DNA of more than 65,000 individuals from around the world showed that R30b is very rare and very Indian. Only 14 examples have been reported and 13 of these were Indian, with one in Nepal. To add to this research, it is important to note that the other related branches of R30b, that is R30a and R30, are also entirely South Asian in origin. This confirms beyond doubt that the mtDNA of Eliza Kewark was of Indian heritage.

R30b is rare even in India where only approximately 0.3% of people carry the lineage. And what Eliza passed down to Princess Diana, her other living descendants and to Prince William is even rarer. Within the haplogroup of R30b, an exact match to her sequence has yet to be found outside of her descendants. But Prince William, and Prince Harry, who also carries it, will not be able to pass on their extremely rare Indian mtDNA to their children. They will in turn inherit whatever their mothers’ mtDNA happens to be.

For yet more corroboration, scientists used an independent type of genetic evidence. By reading over 700,000 markers scattered across the genome of Princess Diana’s matrilineal cousins, and comparing findings to a global database of samples, it is possible to estimate the proportions of continental-level ancestry for an individual. For example, someone with a father from Ireland and a mother from Nigeria would be 50% sub-Saharan African and 50% European, or someone with three English grandparents and one from China would be approximately 20% to 30% East Asian. The proportions inherited from ancestors who lived longer ago are lower and also variable. Eliza Kewark’s two descendants are estimated to be about 0.3% and 0.8% South Asian, with three blocks of South Asian DNA in each of their genomes. All of the rest is of European origin.

It is therefore very likely that in addition to his mtDNA, Prince William has not only inherited a small proportion of Indian DNA from Eliza Kewark but that his heirs will also carry it.

Prince William Found to Have Indian DNA Linked to Princess Diana’s Ancestors

Prince William, second in line to the British throne, will be first British king with proven Indian ancestry, DNA analysis has revealed.

The DNA analysis of saliva samples taken from the Duke of Cambridge’s relatives have established a direct lineage between the 30-year-old prince and an Indian housekeeper on his mother Princess Diana’s side.

It is his only non-European DNA and means he will become the first head of the Commonwealth with a clear genetic link to its most populous nation, India.

William is now likely to be encouraged to make his debut mission to India soon after the birth of his baby next month.

Researchers have uncovered the details of his lineage via a doomed relationship of William’s Indian great-great-great-great-great grandmother.

Eliza Kewark was housekeeper to Prince William’s great grandfather Theodore Forbes (1788-1820), a Scottish merchant who worked for the East India Company in the port town of Surat in Gujarat.

Eliza’s mt DNA was passed on by her daughters and granddaughters directly in an unbroken line to Princess Diana and then on to Prince William and Prince Harry.

Eliza is claimed to have been Armenian, possibly because her surname is rather like the Armenian name Kevork and letters from her to Forbes have been found to contain Armenian script. This, in turn, suggests a degree of Armenian cultural heritage and the possibility that her father may have been of Armenian descent.

“But we believe that all the evidence we have gathered shows that her genetic heritage through her motherline is Indian,” BritainsDNA, a DNA ancestry testing company, said in a release.

“Princes William and Harry carry Eliza Kewark’s markers but will not pass this Indian mtDNA onto their children, as mtDNA is only passed from mother to child,” it added.

Jim Wilson, a genetics expert at the University of Edinburgh and BritainsDNA who carried out the tests, said that Eliza’s descendants had an incredibly rare type of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), inherited only from a mother. It has so far been recorded in only 14 other people, 13 Indian and one Nepalese. The revelation explains why the Scottish father of Eliza’s children suddenly deserted her and sent their daughter, Katherine, to Britain at the age of six.

Researchers have discovered letters from Eliza to Forbes pleading for her to be allowed to see him. When Forbes died on a ship back to Britain in 1820 his will referred to Eliza as his “housekeeper” and the mother of his “reputed natural daughter” Katherine.

“Knowing something about your DNA and its origins in prehistory definitely changes your sense of yourself, and one way that it does that is to make you feel part of a world community,” said Alistair Moffat, the founder of BritainsDNA.

The researchers also used another type of genetic evidence, autosomal markers, scattered across the genomes of Princess Diana’s two matrilineal cousins and compared them to a global database of samples.

“I always assumed that I was part-Armenian so I am delighted that I also have an Indian background,” said Mary Roach, Princess Diana’s maternal aunt who was one of two relatives who provided the DNA samples.

Princess Diana’s Hidden Ancestral Secret Revealed

Once upon a time, a woman from India named Eliza Kewark was shunned by her family because of her race.

The father of her child referred to her as the “housekeeper” and the “purported mother” of their daughter, Katharine. Katharine was sent off without her mother to England, and that’s where this story might have ended. But Katherine gave birth to Jane, who gave birth to Ruth, who had another Ruth, who had Frances, who had Diana. As in Princess Diana. Which means that Great Britain will, one day, have a monarch with Indian blood, and the Commonwealth will be led by a king with a clear genetic link to its most populous nation. Eliza Kewark is Prince William’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmother. She has long been described as Armenian, but Kewark was at least half-Indian, the genetic ancestry testing company BritainsDNA announced today. Will, Kate Celebrate Queen’s 60th Anniversary BritainsDNA says it is confident of Kewark’s lineage because it traced Williams’ mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, which is passed down from mother to child. BritainsDNA took saliva samples from two unnamed members of the royal family and traced it back seven generations to Kewark, who was born around 1790. Kewark’s mtDNA is so rare, BritainsDNA said, that it has only been found in 14 other people, all but one of whom was Indian (the other one was Nepali). “It is therefore likely that Prince William has not only inherited a small proportion of Indian DNA from Eliza Kewark but her heirs will also carry it,” BritainsDNA said today. How the Royal Baby Will Be Kept SafeAccording to the biography “The Real Diana,” by Lady Colin Campbell, Kewark’s background was known but kept quiet by a family that was full of Europeans descended from royalty. “Eliza Kewark was a dark-skinned native of Bombay who had lived, without benefit of matrimony, with her great-great-grandfather Theodore Forbes while he worked for the East India Company,” “The Real Diana” reads. “Unsavory as the taint of illegitimacy was, even at that distance in time, it was nothing compared with the stigma of what was then known as ‘colored blood.’ Had it been generally known that Ruth [Diana’s great-grandmother] and her children were part-Indian, they might never have made good marriages. “Eliza’s true race was therefore expunged from the family tree and she reemerged as an Armenian. This fiction was maintained even when Diana married the Prince of Wales.” But times have changed and, today, and the family of Diana, who died in a car accident in 1997, celebrated their Indian heritage. Mary Roach, Princess Diana’s maternal-aunt, told The Times, “I always assumed that I was part-Armenian so I am delighted that I also have an Indian background.”

The connection traces back just eight generations, with the woman, Eliza Kewark, who was housekeeper to his fifth great-grandfather Theodore Forbes, born in 1788, a Scottish merchant who worked for the East India Company in Surat, a port north of Bombay.

The DNA was passed down through Eliza’s daughters and granddaughters to Princess Diana.

Eliza, who was born around 1790 and lived in India when it was governed by the East India Company, is thought to have had Armenian blood because of her surname and the presence of Armenian script in letters from her to Theodore.

Dr Jim Wilson, a genetics expert at the University of Edinburgh and chief scientist at BritainsDNA, who carried out the scientific research said very little is known about her, including when she died.

He said: “Theodore described her as his housekeeper. It appears they weren’t married.

“Mixed blood is something we celebrate today but that was very much not the case in the past.”

Their liaison began a DNA trail which eventually led to Princess Diana, and will ultimately produce Britain’s first part-Indian king when William ascends to the throne.

The revelation was greeted with delight in some circles in India yesterday – followed by calls for William to capitalise on his newly revealed heritage by paying his first royal visit to the former colony.

But 6,000 miles away, in a tiny village in Herefordshire, one woman already knew the secret. Sarah Drury was told decades ago she was related to royalty through Diana’s DNA chain – and never bothered to speak about it outside her family.

Her grandmother revealed the link to Lady Diana Spencer, as she then was, before she became a queen-in-waiting by marrying the Prince of Wales. ‘I was only young at the time and it didn’t mean a great deal to me,’ she told the Daily Mail.

‘My grandmother explained that her mother had six daughters, and that one of those daughters was the great grandmother of Frances Shand Kydd, Diana’s mother. I didn’t really know who Frances Shand Kydd was at the time because I only heard the name when Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer married.’

In the know: Sarah Jane Drury shares an Indian gene with the late Dianna Princess of Wales

Mrs Drury, a 66-year-old retired interior design company executive and her husband Charles, a former stockbroker, now run a B&B in Turnastone, near Hereford.

Late last year she was contacted by genetic expert Professor Jim Wilson, from Edinburgh University, to invite her to help track Prince William’s lineage. He believed Mrs Drury was a distant cousin of the Prince after investigating a line that led to Bombay, the western port city of Surat, and Eliza Kewark, whom he traced as the prince’s great, great, great, great, great grandmother.

The DNA type that revealed the link is passed on by females and provides ‘unassailable’ evidence, according to Prof Wilson.

‘I got an email out of the blue and he asked me if I would spit into a bottle for him,’ Mrs Drury said. ‘He came back and told me the link. Although I knew there was this connection with Princess Diana I didn’t know until then what the relationship was.’

History: Joan Heather Powell (1917-1994), mother of Sarah Jane Gofton-Salmond, now Sarah Jane Drury. They share an Indian gene with the late Dianna Princess of Wales

She said she was pleased to unravel the precise link – and proud to discover her Indian heritage, although she has never visited. ‘It fits into place because my brother and I both had very black hair and we both tan very easily. We always made a bit of a joke about a mystery ancestor and where it all came from.’

She added: ‘I’m delighted to be associated with India … perhaps I should visit now.’

The clue in the family tree was in her grandmother’s name of Forbes. Some 204 years ago a 21-year-old East India Company merchant called Theodore Forbes arrived in Surat. There he met Eliza, an Indian of Armenian extraction, the sister-in-law of his agent there.

They fell in love and are believed to have married in 1812. The partnership produced a daughter, Katherine, known as Kitty, later that year. Their son Alexander was born two years later; a second son, Fraser, followed – but he died at the age of six months.

If some of the names are familiar now, incidentally, it is because generations later, Diana’s brother Earl Spencer would name two of his daughters Eliza and Kitty.

Theodore got a job through a relative with Forbes and Co, a trading company based in Bombay. The distance from Surat – plus changing social attitudes that frowned on relationships between white traders and local women – meant the couple led separate lives.

Eliza pleaded in a series of letters to be allowed to join her husband. A friend advised Theodore to despatch Kitty, then six, to the Forbes family home in Boyndlie, Aberdeenshire, which he did. But two years later, after Theodore decided to return to Britain, he died on the voyage.

Further evidence of the DNA link came from another cousin, 79-year-old retired journalist and TV scriptwriter Robin Dewhurst, from Petersfield, in Hampshire.

The father-of-two said he too received an unexpected letter last year from Prof Wilson asking him to provide a saliva sample for testing, which he did. He then received a letter back informing him he was probably 1/64th Indian.

He added: ‘All this past has been revealed just by spitting into a test tube. It’s fascinating how through DNA you can recapture the past.’

Prince William’s Indian ancestry revealed by DNA analysis

The DNA analysis of saliva samples taken from the Duke of Cambridge’s relatives have established a direct lineage between the 30-year-old prince and an Indian housekeeper on his mother Princess Diana’s side. (Reuters)

Prince William, second-in-line to the throne, will be first British king with proven Indian ancestry, DNA analysis has revealed.

The DNA analysis of saliva samples taken from the Duke of Cambridge’s relatives have established a direct lineage between the 30-year-old prince and an Indian housekeeper on his mother Princess Diana’s side. It is his only non-European DNA and means he will become the first Head of the Commonwealth with a clear genetic link to its most populous nation, India. William is now likely to be encouraged to make his debut mission to India soon after the birth of his baby next month. Researchers have uncovered the details of his lineage via a doomed relationship of William’s Indian great-great-great-great-great grandmother. Eliza Kewark was housekeeper to Prince William’s great grandfather Theodore Forbes (1788-1820), a Scottish merchant who worked for the East India Company in the port town of Surat in Gujarat. Eliza’s mt DNA was passed on by her daughters and granddaughters directly in an unbroken line to Princess Diana and then on to Prince William and Prince Harry. Eliza is claimed to have been Armenian, possibly because her surname is rather like the Armenian name Kevork and letters from her to Forbes have been found which contain Armenian script. This in turn suggests a degree of Armenian cultural heritage and the possibility that her father may have been of Armenian descent. “But we believe that all the evidence we have gathered shows that her genetic heritage through her motherline is Indian,” BritainsDNA, a DNA ancestry testing company, said in a release. “Princes William and Harry carry Eliza Kewark’s markers but will not pass this Indian mtDNA onto their children, as mtDNA is only passed from mother to child,” it added. Jim Wilson, a genetics expert at the University of Edinburgh and BritainsDNA who carried out the tests, said that Eliza’s descendants had an incredibly rare type of

February 2018

Flickr Photos

Goodreads

Leader4Dev Multistakeholder Multimedia Multicultural Sustainable Development Educator Facilitator Producer Publisher
A independent sustainable development global thought leader and change agent functioning as consultant/facilitator, educator & conventional & web content multimedia producer/publisher and journalist with some three decades experience in media and as a cultural practitioner and more than a decade in devising novel approaches to multistakeholder outreach and engagement that integrate revisioning and synergises of sectoral vision and objectives delivered through culture and gender sensitive lenses.
A print and television journalist with more than a decade experience in building multi-sectoral partnerships with international intergovernmental agencies and promotion of sustainable development for social equity and inclusion for poverty eradication, food security, sound governance through education, literacy, communications, heritage and culture, civic participation, democratic engagement social justice & equality to give effect to the knowledge/ICTs and creative economies.
BA First Class Honours and PhD degrees from the University of the West Indies (UWI); Diploma in Mass Communications, Jawaharlal Nehru University; skills development training in management, leadership, diversity management, ICTs and new media, journalism, communications, fundraising, networking, gender equity and advocacy. Recipient Commonwealth Professional Fellowship; Fellowship to Wolfson College, Cambridge University; the Foreign Press Centre of Japan, UWI post graduate scholar among others.
Culling sustainable knowledge culture for heritage tourism and literacy in own initiative Leaves of Life through LiTTributes, LiTTevents & LiTTours,
Author of Finding A Place &Through the Political Glass Ceiling, LiTTscapes – Landscapes of Fiction from Trinidad and Tobago.
Awards for journalism, arts, culture: Luminary 2015,Media Award for Excellence in Journalism, Pan American Health Organisation Award for Excellence in Journalism; Awards top student IIMC, UWI; Development Policy Blogging for New Media.